Avant Browser

Many people know there are basically ‘the big three’ in browsers, or rather companies producing them; Microsoft, AOL, and Apple; IE, Netscape->Mozilla->Mozilla Firefox and Safari. The first two are safe for Windows users to some extent, while Safari isn’t simply because of incompatibility issues between the Apple and Windows OS protocols. Firefox is arguably the safest browser; currently it can certainly contend to be the speediest Windows app for the purpose. Internet Explorer is simply the most-used and therefore most-attacked of all browsers (it’s got something like 87% of the market as I recall, with Firefox taking up about 8% of what’s left; Opera, while capturing the hearts of a few users over the years, isn’t compatible enough and isn’t part of any OEM package, even for an ISP). [OEM is one of the most misused acronyms. It’s supposed to mean “Original Equipment Manufacture” and so started with actual hardware and now can be extended to software/hardware interfaces according to industry usage.]

Anyway, Avant is back. It’s featured in a ZDNet read. I tried it. I could swear first version was dialup, which would make it truly ancient. It had real crash problems in the days of Windows 98, but then so did Windows 98. I’m going to be trying it on and off for a while.

I still use Firefox, incidentally, although I have main browser and my e-mail with Windows default (sigh). Firefox doesn’t have an e-mail client, and I like reading my mail off my PC not the web (even through an IMAP configuration I’m more comfortable). That is one problem; Gmail won’t support it. It finally does support Thunderbird (Firefox’s mated e-mail client). My main browser is IE8 on an IE7 emulation because of this site (IE 8 is still a beta).

So I’ll be using Avant on and off. It runs as a search window that’s just up to start with, now. The ‘greenprint’ facility that I was talking about I have tried and it essentially works as advertised. It takes the setup print job, gives you a page preview–and does things like allow you to take out the pictures and ads you could do without.

Right now I’m running with less than a gig of RAM, so I want to do a soft boot and see what happens. This would be a result of the Avant browser as far as I can see. I haven’t checked out defaults. I also for that matter haven’t checked out Firefox 3.0 since it was released from beta (I’ve been running it for about 45 days and had an incompatibility problem with links and Avanquest System Suite).